NOTEBOOK - One Good Read: AI shows promise as a physician assistant

If there’s a war going on in developing artificial intelligence, China scored a major win. A report out Monday -- and covered by the New York Times -- shares that a Chinese researcher developed AI to help diagnose some common childhood illnesses, such as the flu. (This came on the same day that the president signed an executive order, America’s AI Initiative.) Experts quoted by the Times said it would be a long time before the system could be used with patients, but there’s great potential. For the U.S., getting the data to put together such a system would be challenging with health care privacy laws and different systems. If you think of how this could be applied locally, this system could be an answer to rural Iowa’s challenges of of having too few physicians.